Rhetorical Matriphagy and the Online Commodification of Higher Education

摘要

Although online education has been promoted as an important tool for ensuring equal access to higher education in a climate of declining financial support, the evidence indicates that online education tends to hasten the development of a highly stratified educational system where the opportunities of marginalized students are limited. This essay introduces the rhetorical matriphagy as an extended analogy to illustrate how online education discourse derives rhetorical force by aligning its central features with three points of correspondence located in the neoliberal reinvention of higher education. The essay concludes by discussing opportunities for critique and moral reflection illuminated by the rhetorical matriphagy beyond higher education.